We want your help to hire an internationally renowned orchestra to record and release the rights to: the Beethoven, Brahms, Sibelius, and Tchaikovsky symphonies. We have price quotes from several orchestras and are ready to hire one…

via Record and release free music without copyrights. by Aaron Dunn — Kickstarter.

This is a brilliant idea, bypassing DRM by recording fresh performances of classical music.  I’m looking forward to filling up my iPod.

Overview | Neater Messaging

This is a great hand-animated view showing some of Waves features. It focusses on the centralization of the conversation, which makes wave cleaner to use than a stack of emails.

Internal Workflow | SAP Gravity

This demonstrates the use of gadgets in a business context. Notice in particular how the centrally hosted gadget:

• preserves a state history so that the different stages in construction of the model can be replayed along with the main conversation
• communicates with the back-end system as part of an extended workflow

Customer Relations | Sales Force

Here a “robot” is used to intelligently deal with the early stages of a customer support query, including eventually passing the customer on to a human support agent. Again, the wave is smoothly integrated with a backend system.

Education | Wave Alpha

Here the Wave Alpha robot uses responds to questions ranging from basic arithmetic, through calculus and meteorology to the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything.

Tags: Google, Wave, communication, integration, business, sales, education

I’m intrigued by the question of ownership of engagement and discussion. I’m seeing a lot of successful bloggers expressing a lot of outrage, and yet normally receiving comments is something that bloggers love, excepting spam, unless it’s really good spam.

As I’m typing this I don’t see what I’m doing as a defacement. My comments are clearly divided from your site. They are in a separate part of my user interface that I have chosen to switch on. When I publish they will appear:

- on one of my blogs
- on my Google Profile
- in my FriendFeed stream
- in my Twitter Stream

These are locations where I like the text that I’ve written to appear.

My choice.
My control.
My browser.

Sidewiki is not the first 3rd party technology to enable the annotation of site, and it won’t be the last. It has a high profile and a high distribution because it’s embedded in the Google Toolbar. It’s not unique, but it is a nice implementation that complements traditional threaded comments. You’ll note that this comment is about a highlighted phrase. That’s a very useful feature for those of us who like to fact check, or to limit our expressed opinions to the narrow scope that we’re comfortable with.

I’d really urge your readers to try before condemning.

Tags: Sidewiki, ownership, conversation

You can even record directly into the web application.

Background

Background information on the development and philosophy of Sidewiki is available on Google’s announcement post:

Help and learn from others as you browse the web: Google Sidewiki

Transcript

With Google Sidewiki you can add public notes to web pages. Sidewiki is part of the Google Toolbar and can be enabled and disabled as needed.

You can vote up helpful notes.

You can find out more about a note’s author by clicking through to their profile.

In my profile you can see the notes I’ve made so far and get an RSS feed of the notes.

Here I’ve got the feed appearing in my blog.

If you follow a link in the feed you get back to the original page where the comment was made.

Here’s where I commented on a BuzzMachine article.

And you can choose to see everyone’s comments – not just mine.

I really like the way the page scrolls to show which text comments refer to.

Comments can be made about snippets of text as well as the article as a whole.

Here I’m leaving a comment about Rapla. An open source booking system that worked well for me.

As soon as I highlight some text an edit button appears in the sidebar.

Bear with me here while I find some text to paste.

And lets give it a nice title.

How about “Implementation at Oxford Medical Sciences Teaching Centre”.

At the bottom of the post you can set up links to your blogger account, and choose whether or not to post automatically. I’ve set up a demo blog so you can see this in action.

Once a comment is saved it can be sent to your social networks. I’m tweeting this one.

You get a pop-up twitter window, and the system generates a draft message for you.

Here it is on my Twitter profile.

If you’re the webmaster of a site you can leave a special comment that will always appear at the top of a page.

I’m setting this up for the home page of my Loosing Site blog. I’m already registered as the webmaster so I’m given an extra checkbox to write as the site’s owner.

My comment is then highlighted green and pushed to the top of the list.

Video product reviews are getting a lot of buzz right now, as shoppers increasingly turn to the web to help them figure out what to buy. We’re excited to announce that we are including relevant and high quality YouTube video reviews on a number of our product pages in Google Product Search. Videos include reviews from sources like USA Today, Wired, and Digital Trends, and they appear above the “Similar Items” section of the page. For example, see the product page for this Nikon D90 camera.

Official Google Base Blog: Lights, Camera, Action!: YouTube Videos in Google Product Search

Through this system manufacturers and distributors are able to link reviews on Youtube to their products using UPC, ISBN, brand and MPN information.

Nikon D90 Digital camera – SLR with Live View mode, movie recording – 12.3 Megapixel – 5.8 x optical zoom via kwout

Consumers are then able to find out more about the product, and also gain an impression of the level of knowledge and service of a supplier.

Tags: YouTube, video, marketing, Google, product, search

There are two other use cases that spring to mind. Accessibility and composition.

In the UK, the Royal National Institute for the Blind recommends the use of metadata, including keywords, to aid navigation.

“Page information metadata must include a page TITLE, keywords, author and description. This should be as accurate as possible to ensure that users get all the information they need to navigate a site.”

Keywords can also provide a useful focus when composing text for a page. It’s a way of noting the few precise concepts you want to cover in a manner that will survive edits and revisions you make in the text.

More information at http://adaptivepath.com/aurora/

In about two weeks we will be launching a change for published docs. The change will allow published docs that are linked to from a public website to be crawled and indexed, which means they can appear in search results you see on Google.com and other search engines. Please note that this only applies to docs which you explicitly publish using the ‘Publish as web page’ or ‘Publish/embed’ option, and which are linked to from a publicly crawled webpage. This doesn’t apply if it’s only set to ‘Allow anyone with the link to view (no sign-in required)’. If you don’t want your published docs to be crawled, then you can un-publish them by doing the following:

Published docs will be crawlable soon – Google Docs Help

This is an excellent opportunity for press releases, reports and presentations to find a wider audience. It’s also means businesses might want to pay more attention to the themes used in their documents, incorporating their own branding elements.

Google Docs Help: Styles In Google Docs – a knol by Google Docs Guide 2 via kwout

Some have expressed concern that private or draft information will now be viewable by the public. Though I’m sure far more are unsurprised by the meaning of the term “publish”.

Tags: Google, apps, docs, publish, search, crawl